Extended Edition iOS Beta Test and Feedback!

Easy play is easier battles but because of that starting out getting resources is really SLOW as you are fighting a fighter or two that give you almost nothing in victory. This is especially true for upgrades. Once I got going after some initial slow grinding I then had plenty of scrap for buying ships but couldn't afford to upgrade almost anything. I've been able to buy 3 strong ships but barely upgrade my fighter bays to the full number of fighters (upgrading nothing else).

Also the reinforcement window should still show the price of the ship even if you can't buy one because your slots are full. The players need to know if they can afford the better ship BEFORE they sell the old one.

Mercenaries need to stay closer to my fleets formation. They seem to just wander off and get themselves killed - and since the ships move pretty slowly you can't chase them down in time to save them.

Faster wingman ships struggle to stay in formation with a slower main ship. Instead of slowing down/stopping to say in formation when flying perfectly straight ahead, the instead fly too fast and then try to turn around and go back and then turn around again to continue forward (and repeat this). All this turning back and forth both looks silly and makes them much larger targets to enemy fire.

The large variety of both weapon choices and the visuals on different weapons is a big improvement from the older version of the game.

Selecting the mission in the star map does NOT zoom the objective star to the center. This makes the player wonder if it is the green star you think is the objective or some unexplored one that seems to have just zoomed to the center of screen.

When selecting the mission in the star map, another color setup is needed. Showing all of the mission sectors (both the selection one and the others) as green is confusing. Either turn off the green of the sectors not included on the selected mission or show the selected mission star sectors in a color other than green.

The missions are buggy. EX 1) I completed one flying to a sector with nothing in it (not green on the star map). EX 2) I had a mission that was pick up crate in the current sector "A" fly to sector "B" and I thought deliver it from the icons, but instead I got another crate in sector "B" and then led to fly back to sector "A" and give the ship that gave me the first crate both the crates. Why would a ship hire me to take it's crate on a tour of the system and then return it to themselves?

Thanks for a nice game - I was thinking of coding up something like this for at least 15 years after playing MOO 2, then came gratuitos space battles. It's sad that games like these are not popular enough to be really profitable though...

The game was very stable, not a single crash. Battery lasted for about 8 hours playing it on iPhone 5s. Waiting for that PC version now

Here are some additional comments:
1) fighters still chase ships that have warped away
2) laser fighters don't stay on target and keep rotating while firing, so most of DPS is wasted
3) it would be very useful to set fighters to follow your ship closely (defend order?). Same distance as warping in.
4) I mentioned that the game is "bursty". would be nice to increase HP of player capital ships by 2-3X... probably 5X for enemies to compensate. Or at least have an option to buff ship's hull with modules/resources.
5) I like how normal plays - it was my second game(have not played this before) and I almost beat it using starting carriers (had some luck and got deathray/mega plasma in all slots). It's definitely not "too hard" and should be easy with heavy carriers that will allow more "chaff".
6) I'm not sure what's the deal with nemesis - they are not powerful or dangerous and are just another ship to kill.
7) weapon balance needs polishing - can send a long and detailed view if needed - the main idea is that shield damage are mostly useless at map 2 or higher.
8) easy is too slow on resources - I'd say normal is easier, since you are getting way better drops and can outfit your ships with max buffs at the end of map 3. Should try "hard" now.

Awesome update! The game has much more depth and feel to it. Also, I wanted to thank y'all for allowing me to participate in the beta testing process. The game worked flawlessly on my iPhone 6s Plus. The game seems to be well balanced except for the final stage (4) which IMO is too easy.

Difficulty: Hard
Ships used to beat game: Guardian, Achilles, Armada

I have included some notes on minor bugs that occurred during my game play. Keep it up guys!

Game Bugs

- troglar Vulcan cannon upgrade bug: when upgrading range, recharge status bar shows increase but number indicator (0.2) does not increase
-mission "visit sector" bug: mission marker indicator on map does not show up until after you visit that sector, only then will the sector turn green with a !
-grammatical error in title descriptions of the Unknown: incorrect use of quotation marks (" ")
-Unknown enemies are too weak: bases do not move as described in title descriptions
-ally base mission error: if you do not click on the mission icon first it will disappear
-mission "pick up items" suggestion: identify mission items so that players know not to sell them
-nemesis auto text prompt and view zoom suggestion: suggest taking out the auto prompt and zoom. Can be very annoying in the heat of battle having to zoom back to your ships after nemesis jumps in
-damage to ship warning (red bars outlining screen) either needs to show up later as the ship gets heavily damaged or needs to blink when damage becomes critical: I found myself ignoring it since even the slightest bit of damage caused it to show up
-turret tracking: sometimes they track enemies and other times turrets won't track at all until it's ready to fire
-mission icons are a mess: sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't and sometimes they show up in areas where there are no mission items (seems to follow you around as you jump)

Thank you to everyone for the feedback! We have closed the Beta for new applicants for now, we submitted the update to Apple and it should be live in a week or so!

We didn't quite have time to fix everything, so feel free to re-iterate things here after my post! I will submit this newest build also to Testflight and you should be able to play the newest version soon.

So feel free to re-iterate things that are still messed up

Randomness of loot drops is too random. Sounds crazy but hear me out. When I find a Human Gatling with 2 upgrades on hull damage floating in space its stats should be identical to the one that I purchased and upgraded with 2 upgrades on hull damage myself. Right now all weapons loot seem to have a random number generating its stats and upgrades. So you can have a heavily "upgraded" weapon with worse stats than an un-upgraded one of the same type purchased at the store. While this adds even more randomness to the game it also makes the game slower/longer and more frustrating as every time I get a weapon I have to carefully compare its stats to see if it is better or worse than my current ones. This also makes it much more difficult to balance the game as 80% of the gear is getting made up stats that could help or hurt the player.

Solution: all the races main weapons need set base stats that upgrade in identical ways. The randomness of the drops should simply be A) what weapon type with B) how many standard upgrades. Then a player can quickly see (for instance) "oh this is an 'unidentified ion cannon' with 2 upgrades on hull and 1 upgrade on accuracy - the one I have already has more upgrades so I'll sell this newly found one..." This also allows players to learn which weapons types they like for their style of play verses "well did that strategy work better because I used more lasers than gatlings or because the specific lasers I happened to find this game were better than they normally are..." This also makes future balancing easier because the devs have fewer variables to adjust.

Exceptions: Total random stats generation could be kept for the more rare items like death ray or repair beam as A) you rarely find multiples of these so comparing stats is minimized for the player and B) it seems more likely that such rare items would be produced more ad hoc manner rather than a mass produced standard short range human laser.

I think you could also institute a RARE loot drop of a "Modified" Weapon (or some other word such as "Rare" that is appended to the title to show it is unique). However such modifications should be better than the now standardized weapons types, as it wouldn't make sense to modify a weapon to make it worse. It would probably be a good idea to show the modified stat as a different color to further highlight its exceptional ability. E.g., a hyper range laser that has 2X the normal laser's range would have the word stat of range in green instead of blue in the ship display.

I keep forgetting to mention I've not had any crashes on my iPad Air 2.

I'm in favor for random stats for weapons - spend too much time with RPGs in my life
But it would be nice to see what stats are better than average/worse for a given weapon.
As for "special" weapons - all weapons should be "special" since no one really cares about "common" drops.

I'm FOR random stats for weapons, but in a systematic way. Here's a RPG example if you find a short sword with +7 damage it should be superior to a short sword with +3 damage. Right now the upgrades listed on dropped weapons have no basis in what the stats of the weapon are - which is confusing for no reason.

I'm arguing for standardized base stats for each race's weapon type (e.g. human lasers) and then do the randomness in how many upgrades it has when initially found (and even vary how many more upgrades it can get) but a heavily upgraded dropped weapon should always be better than a not upgraded dropped weapon (of the same race and type).

a +x sword makes it too easy. I was thinking about diablo-style drops with 2-5 or more "mods" (prefixes/suffixes). currently it feels like the mods are there, but not exposed to player separately, so you see the end result.
And then you can apply current upgrade mechanics on top of it.



One more suggestion: more consumables are needed. Every time I die now is because I get jumped by "adds" on hard without a means to prevent it. I use beacon, to reduce target system to 1 ship, but I have no way to know if I can jump in or need to wait a few turns to fight just that one ship due to fog of war. So if I get 1 ship +2 adds in close(especially the flak kind) I will loose at least 1 ship before FTL charges even with all the fighters around. So, it would be nice to be able to either scout 1 jump further using scrap or to prevent adds from warping in or to warp in with FTL charged.

Just downloaded the update and played for a couple of hours on easy. It looks like the occasional flashing ships have been resolved. It is still more difficult but that adds to the challenge.